Thought Leadership Insights, Episode 4

In FT Longitude’s fourth episode of Thought Leadership Insights, we speak with former FT Longitude Chairman and PR maven Alastair Gornall about the importance of building brand reputation. Alastair shares his views on the current key trends in B2B marketing and communications, together with how companies should be using thought leadership and creative content as a way to increase brand awareness – and the vital role the c-suite has to play in this increasingly important area of focus.

Topics covered

00:00 Introduction
01:00 Alastair’s background and the changing world of communications
03:45 Key trends in brand marketing
04:45 Using thought leadership to rise above the noise
07:00 The potential of thought leadership
08:30 How important is thought leadership to brand marketing?
09:50 How to create balance with your thought leadership
12:20 The future of FT Longitude

Listen to our other podcasts:

Episode 5: Parker Ward on content and thought leadership

Episode 3 | Episode 2 | Episode 1

Podcast Transcript

Fergal: Thank you very much Alastair, for taking the time today to speak to us and welcome to the podcast.

Alastair: My pleasure to be here.

Fergal: It’s interesting to get a little bit about the background, you’re joining the FT Longitude team, Alastair.

Alastair: I’ve spent most of my career building two award winning communications agencies that were public relations led, multidisciplinary, in terms of what we offered different clients, and then I was very lucky to spend six years running Reed exhibitions which gave me a very different perspective from a client point of view. And now, for the last six years, I have a non-executive portfolio career, which is a wonderful thing to have, which means that I’m now working with a very broad selection of media companies and I was approached by a head-hunter to talk to FT Longitude, who were looking for a chairman, and I’m very excited about this because I think FT Longitude is a fascinating business in a really intriguing sector of the media market.

Fergal: Right. That’s very interesting. Clearly, the importance of communications in the work that you’ve been doing over the years in your entrepreneurial and leadership role. And I guess that world is changing a lot.

Alastair: I think enormously. Certainly, I’ve been around a while, but if I go back to the 80’s and the 90’s and the 00’s, I think that the change in the style of communication was extraordinary. Certainly in the 90’s most of the campaigns that we were running through broad selection of clients from Disney and Virgin and Budweiser, et cetera, were about products and features. And of course nowadays the whole world is about influencing influencers. And it’s radically different than, obviously, with the social media, digital content, et cetera.

Today, I think we as consumers, be it B2B or B2C environment, we cut through and see through false claims and hype very, very quickly – we’re not tolerant of that. We want credible, believable communications. We want companies who deliver what they say they’re going to do. We want companies who behave properly from the top to the bottom in everything they do, with all of the people they relate to. And the combination of all that is about the reputation of the business. So, as I said earlier on, reputations are destroyed so quickly now, and so it’s got to be embedded in every part of the organisation and the it’s got to be driven by the chief executive, who is ultimately the chief reputation officer for an organisation. And he’s got to understand that everything that goes on there is going to build up on how a company is perceived which will have a direct knock-on effect on that commercial success.

It’s hugely important now, and what I find interesting, is that years and years ago reputation would be bedded somewhere in the corporate comms or the marketing department. But now chief executives realise it’s vital to the C-suite, everyone’s got a role to play, and if they don’t get it right they lose their job. So it’s a key KPI, I think, the link between reputation of organisation and the value of it. And it’s driven by the CEO who’s got the levers of power there to influence it.

Fergal: You’ve had extensive experience in the world of brand marketing, can you talk a little about some of the key trends you see today?

Alastair: Clearly brand marketing has always been vital to business. And it’s as vital today as it ever has been. I think the reputation of a brand or organisation is vital that it’s taken very, very seriously from the C-suite downwards. Because as we all know reputations are being destroyed so rapidly, and you have to take a very broad view of your brand. So even if you’re a supermarket, where you’re still selling products through it, how you treat your local communities you work in, to how you treat your staff, it all plays to the reputation of your brand. It’s become a much more complex world that we live in. People have to take it very seriously and it needs to be embedded in the DNA of the whole organisation, from the CEO down to the most junior employee. So it’s vitally important – it’s never been more important – but it’s much more complex now.

Fergal: Absolutely. There’s been a proliferation of content marketing in various media and various formats, I think consumers of thought leadership are overwhelmed and this highlights the crucial importance that an organisation’s thought leadership is authoritative, stands out and rises above the noise.

Alastair: I totally agree. And I think any major brand nowadays, especially in a B2B environment nowadays, is looking to be a thought leader in its own marketplace. And I think it underpins the whole reputation of that organisation in terms of its innovation, its product development, its ability to help solve issues and problems for clients. So it is a fast moving fast part of the marketing mix. I think it’s something where many organisations are doing an adequate job at how they develop thought leadership and apply it. Some are doing a great job. But there are huge gains to be got by getting it right and getting really robust thought leadership.

One of the things I do is that I go to the most incredible conference. The largest gathering of CIO’s in the world is held every year in Florida and I’ve been to it for the last six years. And it’s fascinating to me how most of the exhibitors at that conference, the major technology companies in the world, thought leadership is probably the key thing they are all trying to promote, versus the features and benefits of their products.

Fergal: That’s very interesting. The Harvard Business Review put it succinctly I think in a recent article; “The only sustainable form of business leadership today is thought leadership”.

Alastair: Yeah, I totally agree. And as we all know it’s got to be very robust and I think one of the things that I’ve loved about what I’ve seen at FT Longitude is that they have a phenomenal pedigree in terms, where the founding partners, the team have come from, and it’s a very bright organisation with very intelligent, experienced people. I think the robustness that goes into the design, the development, the implementation of the thought leadership is something that is very impressive because you do see some thought leadership programmes brands put out, which, to be honest with you, are quite flaky and done by some student or somebody in a university. It may not be too robust, and clearly that will damage your reputation as a client if you do that.

Fergal: Yes, I think some of the research that FT Longitude has done on thought leadership shows the consequences of exactly that. And if you’re insights aren’t robust, if they’re not drawn from proper statistical or foundations and analysis, that it actually can damage your brand.

Alastair: I totally agree.

Fergal: How well developed do you think thought leadership is i...